[Megathread] DotA 2

I realise this is the LoL forums, but I figured that since I saw a bunch of people mention it already in the various threads here, we might as well put it in one consolidated thread. Had a quick look in the regular video games forum, but didn't see anything there.

So... why should I play DotA2 over LoL? What's its advantages? Where's the fun part (as in, more fun than HoN/LoL)? Anything else you want to share?

Kindly keep the discussion friendly. I realise there will be comparisons, but there's no need to start name-calling.

Mod edit: As this has turned into a general discussion of DotA 2 and no longer has anything to do with LoL, I have moved this thread to the general Video Games Discussion forum.

Any discussion regarding DotA 2 is to be taking place here and not anywhere else on the forums.

The guy who introduced me to LoL gave me a beta key like 2 weeks ago and was like "you're playing this game". For the first week or so i blindly hated on it for no reason and quite frankly didn't enjoy myself. Then i decided to give it a fair shot and so far it's been a blast.

Dota has a lot more active items. Pretty much every summoner spell in LoL can be found on an item in dota. You have healing boots, teleportation boots, mana boots, stat boots and also movement speed boots. There are items that give your team stealth, healing, shields, damage evasion etc. So you often find yourself experimenting with items and that gives you a lot more to explore in the game.

Laning phase is a lot more active in dota. CC lasts a lot longer than League. Many champions have non-ultimate disables that are as long as 4 seconds. This means ganking is very very prevalent.

There is no meta that forces you into specific setups. I've played games where we ran triple-bot and other stuff like double-mid. Junglers aren't required. There are a set amount of good junglers so you usually choose them for their ganking power and not for farming and having another gold pool.

Scaling is a lot more different. There are int, agi and str champions. Auto attacks from mages can deal tons of damage because of the way stats scale so you never find yourself tickling enemies. With a few exceptions abilities don't scale with stats. So mages usually want to get fed early and establish a level advantage.

Micro-managing (assigning hotkeys to stuff like courier and your minions to control them easier) is very hard to get used to at first but it's by no means hard.

Agility heroes scale extremely hard because they get attack speed and damage from agility (int heroes get damage and mana from int, str heroes get health and damage from str) so if you manage to get fed you can pretty much carry hardcore. I'm talking about 2x the carrying power vayne had before nerfs. Yea.

Games are super easy to turn around if you manage to somehow shutdown their carry or if you haven't fed him too much.

League feels a lot easier to pick up and play to be honest. Whenever i go into a solo Dota game i get raged at for random stuff and if they catch a LoL player the community is VERY hostile. I accidently say "champion" and people pounce on with elitist comments about how platinum in league is like the bronze of dota and so forth. Very hard to play without a friend.

Not sure if it's because i'm new to the game but i often find teammates feeding and pretty much losing the game from the start. There is also no surrender so sometimes you have enemies deliberately farming you for kills not ending the game.

At times it gets very frustrating but it's a very fun game.

I don't want to choose. That was the reason why my first week i hated on it. I invested so much time in League and if i pick Dota i will be throwing all that away. It's super complicated >.>
Also:

Dota has no smart casting and it's very close to an RTS in the sense that champions are kind of slow. So in terms of clutch-skill and on the spot decision making League is leagues ahead. Dota usually has this one strategy you make up and follow as closely as you can. So think a more RTS-like LoL.

Dota is absolutely more complex than league. I'm not going to comment about high level competitive play complexity, since I'm not familiar with league at that level, but from a basic bare-bones look dota is significantly more complex. A large part of the complexity comes from the items, and some from the heroes. Item choices are extremely varied; nearly every item has a role and a place for its use, and while there are cookie cutter builds, you often find competitive matches with people straying from them(though if the straying works it ends up entering the meta as the new norm, such as whats happening with Tiny and Aganhims right now).

Hero complexity is also much higher, I feel, in Dota than it is in LoL. I'm not talking strategy, but just WHAT DOES THIS MOVE DO. There are heroes like Invoker with 10 spells, heroes like AA with massive walls of text in their abilities, etc. It results in a game that requires, I feel, a lot more knowledge to pick up. That said, many of the more complex/newer heroes are not in the game yet, but when they will be added it only increases the knowledge you need.

Complexity aside, the game is also different in several key aspects. First is the early-mid game. One of the big things that LoL did different than dota is that towers in dota do a lot less damage. This makes ganking a lot easier, and a lot more prevalent. The laning phase lasts longer, and denies makes csing even more important in lane; its not enough to simply cs well, you must also prevent the other player from csing. With the ganking/laning phase last longer, you have games focused more around clashes in the early-mid game than LoL does, I feel. Adding items in like smoke of deceit in dota makes it even easier to gank and even more important.

The biggest difference I feel in dota, though, is the way games can turn on a dime. In LoL, if you're up 15 kills, its very unlikely that you'll lose. In dota, it only matters if you're up 15 kills and winning on farm; there are plenty of competitive games where a team seems to have a major advantage, only to lose a teamfight and then proceed to lose the game.

All said in done, I prefer dota to LoL. However, I am biased toward dota; like I said, I never came close to playing anything that could be considered competitive matches in LoL, whereas I have tried playing in various leagues in Dota in the past. But I find I like dota more.

Edit: I realize I sort of came across suggesting that Dota is a more complex game at a high level than LoL, and thats not my intention. I have no idea how complex LoL can be at the high level, and I am in no place to make that judgement. When I talk about complexity, I mean the ease at which a person who is new to the game can enter dota and pick up whats going on; I definitely feel that there is a lot more going on in Dota than LoL and is a lot harder to pick up. There is also a lot of mech background that isn't evident to the player, for example, in Dota 2, you can actually use Maelstrom and another Orb together due to the way mech is done, even though the tooltip says differently. Theres a lot of things like this in the game for both items and heroes that raises the bar of entry when it comes to the knowledge needed to succeed.

I don't like how you're generalizing Sadinar. Invoker has more than 10 abilities that he needs to invoke on-the-go. Effectively making him one of the most complex heroes in the game. But there are champions who have 2 passive spells and 2 active spells effectively making them a lot simpler than most League champions in terms of mechanics. Sven for example. His Q is a targetted aoe stun, his w is passive cleave damage, his e is armor and movespeed to everyone and his ult is a % damage increase. There's nothing complex about that.

I feel like the complexity of Dota mainly comes from items and the choices you have to make. I haven't exactly experienced dota all that much, but i have played in lots of Go4LoL's and played over 1k ranked games so i am also kinda biased.

@Duilliath the game is being developed by Valve bro Kinda have to get on steam.

Also dota has Tobi Wan. If this guy was casting League, i wouldn't even try Dota

I always liked DotA more than LoL/HoN.
My opinion is by no means biased because I only played DotA when I was a noob, and didn't play many games either. Like 10 games versus my 800 games in LoL.
But they only thing I hated about WC3 DotA is that you need to mouse-over someone to know if they are friendly or foe. It was really hard to tell which champions are on your team or not if you don't know all the champions before hand.

Dunno if that is different now, but that's the only reason of why I never really picked it up. But still, I liked it way more than LoL. Sometimes I watch the DotA tournaments and they look way more exciting.

I'm getting DotA2 because It brings back nostalgia. The new games look weird too. I bet LoL and HoN has updated features and whatnot, but that's not what I want. I'll go with the original characters, and on top of that, VALVE is making it so it'll probably be on Steam.

Basically I dont like the idea that Dota2 is trying to be the exact copy of Dota1, just with renewed graph. Like... it's been YEARS since dota was released. Core mechanics are getting old. So the list of advantages that made me switch from dota to lol is still here, making sure I wont switch back.
There are some cool champs (lancer, storm spirit, kunkka and techies) in Dota that i'd like to play again, and maybe I will but apart from those few most champs are extremely boring.

I'm getting DotA2 because It brings back nostalgia. The new games look weird too. I bet LoL and HoN has updated features and whatnot, but that's not what I want. I'll go with the original characters, and on top of that, VALVE is making it so it'll probably be on Steam.

It's already on steam dude. Kinda ironic how you don't want to go with HoN/LoL becuase they look weird but don't think so for Dota. Nearly EVERY hero looks different. Chen for example was an Orc in Dota, he's a black guy in Dota 2. So you're kind of contradicting yourself.

It's already on steam dude. Kinda ironic how you don't want to go with HoN/LoL becuase they look weird but don't think so for Dota. Nearly EVERY hero looks different. Chen for example was an Orc in Dota, he's a black guy in Dota 2. So you're kind of contradicting yourself.

I did play HoN for a while but it felt weird. I opened and checked LoL but it looked... plastic.
Then again, they are changing many characters. Some for better and some for worse. At least I know which characters are which and I don't have to relearn a system.

We'll see if I play it at all. I don't have any friends that play them anymore and starting again from scratch would probably end up in my team getting a beating time after time because I suck. Oh well.

Basically I dont like the idea that Dota2 is trying to be the exact copy of Dota1, just with renewed graph. Like... it's been YEARS since dota was released. Core mechanics are getting old. So the list of advantages that made me switch from dota to lol is still here, making sure I wont switch back.
There are some cool champs (lancer, storm spirit, kunkka and techies) in Dota that i'd like to play again, and maybe I will but apart from those few most champs are extremely boring.

This is the one reason I HATE Dota2. Don't get me wrong, I used to be on the USA dota team and on top3 US team. Back in the day Dota was amazing and that has not really changed.

What really irks me is they remade the EXACT same game with upgraded graphics.

Lastly, the game is really slow in comparison to the Hon/LoL. Heroes have long turn times, spells don't cast instantly, and it feels sluggish and slowed down. This used to be a good thing, but after playing HoN competitively for 2 years it is tough going back.

I'm in the Dota 2 Beta, and all I can say is that it is (for me) lightyears ahead of League of Legends. The system is not as clunky, it is new player friendly, the heroes are extremely balanced, and the community is much nicer. You can practice on bots that are rather good, and the elite players (Purge and company) make exceptional videos on how to play each of the characters in the various manners available to them.

I tried League of Legends for a bit, but I just couldn't get into it. I assume it is going to end up coming down to a personal preference.

---------- Post added 2012-03-09 at 06:51 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Thigrai

Nearly EVERY hero looks different. Chen for example was an Orc in Dota, he's a black guy in Dota 2. So you're kind of contradicting yourself.

Chen is one example. Invoker, Morphling, Drow Ranger, Pudge, Clinkz, Brood Mother, Weaver, Lich, Nature's Prophet, Sniper, Outworld Destroyer, Omniknight, Dragonknight, etc etc are all very similar to their original models, but updated to better fit the game. Chen and Leviathan obviously needed to change, but for all intensive purposes they are the same.

Originally Posted by Imadraenei

You can find that unbiased view somewhere between Atlantis and that unicorn farm down the street, just off Interstate √(-1).

Metagame in Dota1/2 is alot less rigid than LoL, there are more different strategies to run, ie, pushing, ganking, etc, you can have tri lane, duo lane, and jungler is never required at highest level. Metagame is still changing in Dota1, not to mention different regions have their own play style (European teams favor heavy pushing lineups, Chinese teams favor late game/team fight lineups, Southeast Asian teams favor heavy ganking/chasing lineups, etc), so when you have an international tournament, you get a clusterf*** of awesome. Whereas LoL metagame has become quite stale, with mandatory jungler, solo mid, solo top, ad/support bot, with most games banning the almost same heroes (not saying this doesn't happen in dota1/2, but too a lesser extend).

Chen is one example. Invoker, Morphling, Drow Ranger, Pudge, Clinkz, Brood Mother, Weaver, Lich, Nature's Prophet, Sniper, Outworld Destroyer, Omniknight, Dragonknight, etc etc are all very similar to their original models, but updated to better fit the game. Chen and Leviathan obviously needed to change, but for all intensive purposes they are the same.

Ooooh, those names bring back memories. I hope I get a place in the beta soon. D: